Diseases Design Document

[Pok27]

Basic disease design document (without mutations or creations)
Needed for space-wizards/space-station-14#40545

[K-Dynamic]

You've outlined diseases and virology which is good, but haven't really answered the following:

1. Why we want to simulate diseases in SS14
2. Why you want to base SS14 diseases on Paradise Station over other forks
3. How diseases and virology will impact player, antagonist, and department gameplay loops

[Pok27]

You've outlined diseases and virology which is good, but haven't really answered the following:

1. Why we want to simulate diseases in SS14
2. Why you want to base SS14 diseases on Paradise Station over other forks
3. How diseases and virology will impact player, antagonist, and department gameplay loops

2. I think it is best suited to the foundation of the new system, which can be relatively easily made more distinctive in the future. But I think this can be removed from the design document.

I will add the rest later.

[K-Dynamic]

Maintainers are also against the idea of jobs that spend almost all their time in a single room. Unfortunately, virologists and quarantined patients are isolated from the station by nature, so who's to say what their thoughts will be.

If there's anything real world pandemics taught us, virologists got very busy performing swabs and contact tracing patients. This might be something you could get virologists to do than to solely find a cure. Hell, give them a computer that does disease monitoring.

[Hanzdegloker]

Virologists could need to collect various blood samples from specific patients who might be natrually immune or resistant to diseases as well as, if its a real bad disease, travel to different quarantined departments to innoculate people. I like to imagine during zombies they would be all over the place, perhaps if med gets over run doing maints-viro to make a cure.

You can certainly make a more mobile virologist

[K-Dynamic]

Also give virologists the ability to lock down departments or force people into plastic bubbles

[slarticodefast]

This design doc is mostly a shopping list of features you want to add, and does not really mention any design points at all.
Why are you implementing it the way you chose to?
Are you directly following the SS13 implementation? Which points deviate from that and especially why did you choose to deviate from it?
What is the intended roundflow for the new job? What kind of gameplay should be avoided? Especially address the concern that was brought up about players spending too much time in isolation.
Also see the proposal template.
These are the important questions a design doc should answer so that future contributors know what kind of changes will be accepted or not.

[slarticodefast]

Also you have to link your proposal in the SUMMARY.md file so that it will be visible on the web page.

[Pok27]

Are you directly following the SS13 implementation? Which points deviate from that and especially why did you choose to deviate from it?

I would like to avoid this, I based it on that, but it can be considered separately from ss13 (I don't want to fill the document with all the differences that may accumulate during the discussion :d)

[slarticodefast]

My point was that you should mention what made you implement the feature the way you did, and inspiration from ss13 is only one possible answer. If you did not base it on that that's totally fine.

[Princess-Cheeseballs]

An issue here and with other parts of the doc is it lacks a why or how.

Gameplay should be interesting for all parties involved, infected, medical, and crewmember.

I agree! But how do we do that? Are the disease effects interesting? Is getting cured fun? Are there benefits and consequences to choices each party makes? Do players feel like they have a meaningful choice?

A design doc should be asking and answering these questions not just for this bullet point but all of them in the doc.

[PJB3005]

I cannot take this design doc in good faith given the fact it was clearly written post-fact and, from my own reading, has many glaring absences.

We ask for design docs ahead of making a PR with 3,700 line changes. This way we can vet the system, at least in a basic form, before contributors spend a significant amount of time making a feature that might not ever work in SS14's context.

Virology has been a common mechanic in SS13 servers, yes, but it has also commonly been a terrible mechanic in practice. This is despite there being many SS13 servers with many takes on the concept, and even SS14 having had its own shot at it (and it being removed because it was awful).

Despite this historical baggage, this design doc makes no attempt to acknowledge it or compare with SS13, let alone compare multiple disease systems (Paradise's is not the only one). This is hugely problematic.

There are sections like "Core design principles" which, while sounding nice, are not the basis for most of the core design, given that you made this list up in response to being told to write a design document. Many sections of the document seem to be outright padding for space via complex writing. Spots like "Desired player experience" read more like a poorly thought out excuse to involve every department rather than actually being realistic.

Furthermore, maintainers have already asked you the hard questions about how SS13 diseases work ("quarantine sucks, what's your plan?") and you've avoided answering them.

I'm sorry, but we cannot really critically review this design document because it reads more like a justification to save 3,700 lines of work rather than an actually thought-out design document. I want to repeat myself: this is why we demand design documents ahead of time.

[PJB3005]

To give another example of how this design document misses the mark, it spends most of its time discussing all the cool things diseases do. For most players, however, this is how diseases interact with gameplay in SS13:

1. regular crew get diseases from factors mostly out of their control, have to sit in medbay while they get treated. Or they can be irresponsible, run around the station, and make the situation worse (oh boy how fun)
2. medbay does nothing while they wait on one (1) virologist to do their job
3. the virologist hopefully knows what they are doing. If they do not, they are hurriedly reading the guidebook while half the station is screaming at them
4. the virologist has nothing to do for the rest of the shift except make super omega positive effect disease (sits in lab all day) or make super omega murder disease (they are a traitor and the shuttle got called before they left their lab also if the CMO checks their work once they get arrested)

A design document like this should go into much more focus about how players interact with diseases. The most you have for "regular crew" is "Crew make meaningful, situational choices: mask up, seek treatment, help with cleaning." and one of those bullet points is the janitor's job, and you don't even explain what needs to be cleaned.

[Pok27]

I will redo all of this, thank you for your feedback.

[Pok27]

As for the virologist, I think his problems are practically impossible to solve. It is very difficult to make his role interesting outside of virus outbreaks, and during these outbreaks, if medical personnel do not rely on him, he will become unnecessary. He can be excluded from this document so that medical personnel can do his job themselves as needed.

[Arraydeess14]

Please

[Pok27]

@Princess-Cheeseballs Hi, I've updated the document, it's not quite ready yet (I need to fill in the Background heading properly, etc.), but am I heading in the right direction?

[K-Dynamic]

Reads well in concept for diseases, some sections just need a bit more detail.

[Princess-Cheeseballs]

A big improvement, I think you should go into more detail and specifically make a clear difference between diseases as a consequence versus diseases as an event.

Why does a person get infected with a localized disease? When should we start punishing them for it? What should those punishments be? When the disease first start? When it progresses? And of course at what point should it start spreading beyond them if left untreated? And how do we ensure that this doesn't feel unfair to an uninvolved crewmember.

For global diseases much of the same but more of "How do we make this feel fun for a person who has been randomly infected at no consequence of their own?" Space Station is a wacky game so we don't need to adhere to reality when it comes to the things diseases can do to people.

In addition, should ignoring a disease always have consequences? Should crew-members be able to gamble with their lives and sometimes win? Should all diseases be harmful?

[Pok27]

Well, there's still work to be done, I'll get to it a little later. Thanks for the detailed review.

[FairlySadPanda]

The main design friction here is going to be quarantine vs cure - these are two different pillars.

Crewmate gets disease from some source -> disease gives some problem the player needs to solve -> disease handled by med -> crewmate OK

Diseases can then be anything from particular types of poison, to food poisoning, to a viral infection, to magic nonsense.

This makes diseases into a pillar of medical gameplay -> you don't just handle trauma, you handle weird shit that can go wrong in the body.

Quarantine to me feels like an antagonistic force -> the station needs to fight off the spread of some disease. We already have that with zombies to an extent. Oldheads will remember "sentient disease" as an outright antag!

I think it's two documents. "An outbreak of something infectious" being a potentially very unfun PVE antag that needs TLC to make work well doesn't need to block the existence of diseases outright.

"Virology" and a virologist job role is also something that needs to be parcelled out separately. It will be a cold day in hell before Wizden accepts the traditional virology and genetics roles that 13 med had, and "this one role is required to counter bad thing X" is banned as design.

[Pok27]

"Virology" and a virologist job role is also something that needs to be parcelled out separately. It will be a cold day in hell before Wizden accepts the traditional virology and genetics roles that 13 med had, and "this one role is required to counter bad thing X" is banned as design.

This is not relevant for the current version of the document (?)

The rest is worth thinking about. For now, I will follow the scenario proposed by Princess, and then we can discuss whether these contradictions remain.

[Princess-Cheeseballs]

Two things.

[Princess-Cheeseballs]

Nitpick. I think this just needs global diseases to be filled out and I'll have some others look at it then start a vote.

I'm gonna wait till after offmed testing to start a vote since a lot of attention is going to that right now.

[Princess-Cheeseballs]

I'd use disease here since viruses are very specific and don't include like, fungal infections, parasites, bacteria ect.

[Pok27]

I corrected this because I don't expect that after some kind of gangrene there should be immunity after recovery, but from the flu virus - yes.

[Pok27]

Perhaps immunity needs to be described in more detail, but for now, I'm satisfied with it.

[Pok27]

No D:

[sowelipililimute]

i'm still not really on board with this as presented, for a few reasons:

• there's still no discussion on what exactly the goal of this on roundflow is intended to be. is it meant to push for players caring about station sanitation? is it meant to add a new thing for players to react to with station events? who knows, i can attempt to guess based on the features outlined here but i don't know what you want them to work for.
• the features outlined here don't really address the fundamental tension between "trivial to fix" and "optimum gameplay is sitting in a box for 10 minutes while virus guy does the job" that plagues previous takes on virology as much as it just leans into the "make it easier to fix" side of things
• in general, it's good when players can react to things and when they can see something oncoming and dread it or wonder if they got got by having seen something. player <-> player transmission as outlined wouldn't really play into that, because, something as simple as passing by a player could infect you and there was nothing you could've done about it

overall, i would be much happier if there was a greater focus on diseases as a means of amplifying clearly telegraphed environmental hazards (what you termed local outbreaks) and pushing player<->player contagion/random station events to the back.

[Pok27]

• there's still no discussion on what exactly the goal of this on roundflow

Okay, I'll add it a little later.

• the features outlined here don't really address the fundamental tension between "trivial to fix" and "optimum gameplay is sitting in a box for 10 minutes while virus guy does the job" that plagues previous takes on virology as much as it just leans into the "make it easier to fix" side of things

I think there’s a balance: if the crew doesn’t want to infect others, they can choose not to sit around for 10 minutes doing nothing; they could be given a drug that suppresses transmission and released until a proper treatment is ready. But it’s not that trivial, since half the station could be infected and the later stages of the disease will be more dangerous. If it’s a severe disease, that won’t work, and anyway the disease itself should be fun (like zombies) to make isolation make sense.

• in general, it's good when players can react to things and when they can see something oncoming and dread it or wonder if they got got by having seen something. player <-> player transmission as outlined wouldn't really play into that, because, something as simple as passing by a player could infect you and there was nothing you could've done about it

If the disease itself is well-designed, then accidentally becoming infected should not be too annoying. There are a huge number of random events in the game that affect the player through no fault of their own. The document attempts to provide countermeasures to make it fairer, but not completely predictable.

overall, i would be much happier if there was a greater focus on diseases as a means of amplifying clearly telegraphed environmental hazards (what you termed local outbreaks) and pushing player<->player contagion/random station events to the back.

The document was originally created for them, and some parts will not work without them, like vaccines. They could be thought out and justified in a more interesting way, but I cannot refuse them.

[ThatGuyUSA]

I like the idea of space critters or other vermin carrying diseases. The crew has gotten too comfortable fighting giant spiders and eating food that's been bitten by snails and mice.

Salvage being bit by a space tick isn't just poison anymore, it could be a viral infection. Sec usually sizes them up when they go lay their filthy suits on the communal medical beds anyways so if they confiscate their dirty blood crusted contraband and get infected themselves it could further the spread!

This promotes cleanliness, station hygiene, and makes bio-hazardous threats actually something to be concerned about.

Your average passenger would shrug off a giant talking RAT being in the kitchen, whereas in real life that would be a health violation! Far too often does the station get left a bloody mess due to a lack of reason to care. A giant pool of blood in medical is hardly ever acknowledged. People leave food out on floors where ants and other nasties could come and claim it, but a few minutes could pass by and some gremlin will just pick it up and eat it, even if it's been sitting in a pile of vomit or other hazardous liquids.

Far too often do janitors just give up their duties in medical, so many people will carelessly share needles to save on time, when something like that would never pass in a sterile environment. Countless passengers self medicating by sipping out of the chemical containers that the whole station draws from. It's nasty!

Botany is always growing robust plants that release countless spores and other pollens into the air, leaving mountains of produce on the floor that's probably been soaking in who knows what from excessive reagent grinding! Only to hand it out a few minutes later to a passenger at their counter to eat it.

We have crew members drinking jungle juice off the very floor they stand on because it's funny... but that's disgusting! Bartenders reusing the same metamorphic glasses, never cleaning them! It's sickening!

People crawling through filth pools when wounded to get a tactical advantage, but showing very little regard to infections they could contract.

Your average person will never take off their gloves, they'll do everything them equipped.
Murder, cleaning, eating, mining, constructing, petting! I mean people only reserve soap cleaning for evidence removal, but they never wash the blood off themselves or their clothes after brutalizing someone. That poses a serious health risk and makes you look suspicious!

There's a lot of ways this could affect the round flow and mannerisms of the crew. It's just dependent on how far you want to go simulating it!